"Autopsy" ~ Christopher ~ First Draft

Christopher selected words provided by Julie Carter. Thanks Julie!

AUTOPSY

I am holding my own orange guts,
forced to scoop out with bare hands
the wet strings of muscly flesh
twisting, wavy hair
alive in my fingers.

And I am crying.

My hands are thick in slime,
and the oh-so- slight catch of flesh
pulling apart from the slippery walls
is enough to make me gag.

And then I do -- my throat
clogged with the stink.

Something in the gut
I still have inside me
quivers. It is a worm?

This hollow place I am up to
my elbow in looks like
home to worms and their
seeds slip in and out
of my fingers, an infestation
of their eggs, boiled white
as the white of the worm.

I am making a burlesque
of my own autopsy!
But they won't let me stop.

Someone is calling me
a little baby, someone is shaking
their head and someone
is shaking me:

Stop crying
It's only a pumpkin.



Julie's Words:
pumpkin, wavy, burlesque, clog, boiled

Quarrel Begins!

OK. I had what I thought would be a crazy idea to start a blog where poets could share poems from the first-raw-sometimes scary-first-draft to the finished draft. I sent Kate Evans an email to test the waters, to see if she would email back telling me, "thanks, but no thanks because it sounds crazy;" however, what I got was the opposite. Before a day has passed Christopher Hennessy and Genevieve Lyons agreed to join Kate and me as full-time participants in Quarrel, and Charles Jensen joined on board as a part-time participant. I'm lucky to have these poets on board!

Thus, thanks to the title suggestion from Christopher, QUARREL is born!


(1) To get the drafting going we need some blogosphere participation. Please leave five words in a comment to this post--- please one set of words per person. We won't hesitate to let you know if we need more words.

(2) We are deciding amongst ourselves who will be the first victim, I mean poet, to start. The poet will have two weeks to write a first draft to share via the blog. After the first poet's draft is up, another poet will pick a set of words and have the same two week period to have a first draft in the blog.

(3) Poets will have one month from the day their first draft is posted to submit a second draft.

(4) The cycle keeps will repeat in this fashion. After the second draft is posted, poets are not restricted with a time deadline; however, they are encouraged highly to share drafts as soon as possible. :-)

Of course, we might change the rules at any given time to keep things lively. We also hope to bring in guest poets as we get the blog in high gear.

Feel free to email us thequarrelpoets@gmail.com.

I hope you'll join us for the ride!